The First Hundred Customers Never Come From the Plan (opens in new tab)

Stewart Butterfield did not set out to build a workplace messaging platform. He set out to build a video game called Glitch. When Glitch failed in 2012, his team had spent years building internal tools to coordinate remote work, and those tools turned out to be more interesting than the game. Slack launched in 2013 and acquired its first hundred customers mostly by calling in favors, getting friends at other companies to try it, and then watching those companies beg for more seats. The go-to-...